The present invention relates to a mobile telephone set and a mobile telephone system, in particular to a mobile telephone set capable of altering key layout on the mobile telephone set, responsive to application program downloaded to the mobile telephone set, and a mobile telephone system including such a mobile telephone set.
Such a mobile telephone set includes a portable telephone set, a PHS (Personal Handy phone System) telephone set, a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) terminal equipment having radio telephony function, and an automobile telephone set, and the like. Among these mobile telephone sets, particularly, the portable telephone set and the PHS telephone set have been rapidly progressed on the ground that portability of the portable and the PHS telephone sets have been improved by being made more compact and more light, that the portable and the PHS telephone sets have been rendered to have a multi-function, that the charge for a telephone call by the portable and the PHS telephone sets have been reduced, and the like. As an example of PHS having such a multi-function, unexamined Japanese patent publication Hei 10-271562, namely, No. 271562/1998 discloses a constitution that a game software can be downloaded from data base station to the PHS.
In an operating portion of the portable telephone set or the PHS telephone set, numeral buttons (keys), symbols, and function buttons (keys) are located together in a front surface of the body portion thereof. However, it is difficult to obtain a space for increasing numbers of the buttons (or keys), because of necessity for maintaining that the portable and the PHS telephone sets are made more compact and more light. Under the circumstances, requirement for the multi-function is tried to be achieved by assigning a plurality of functions to a single key. On the other hand, keys are located mainly in order to achieve dial function as a telephone set. As a result, the numerals keys 0 to 9 are located similarly to a conventional telephone set. The other buttons (keys) are variously located, dependent on design policy per each manufacture.
However, in a conventional mobile telephone set, a layout of the buttons are determined, when the conventional mobile telephone set is designed by the manufacture. In addition, the buttons themselves are merely located on the conventional mobile telephone set as parts of the conventional mobile telephone set. It is therefore impossible to alter the layout of the buttons after the conventional mobile telephone set has been manufactured. As a result, according to an application program, such as i-mode, and the like, it is caused to occur that a user of the conventional mobile telephone set cannot push the buttons easily. Thus, operability by the user is deteriorated. Further, it becomes difficult for the manufacture to develop such an application program.
On the other hand, in spite of such physical buttons, a mobile telephone set having an operating portion consisting mainly of a liquid crystal display and touch sensors combined therewith has come to be in sale recently. In this mobile telephone set, it is possible to change correspondence between each touch sensor and each function by altering a mode of the mobile telephone set with respect to functions developed by the manufacture themselves. However, the button layout thereof cannot be altered in response to each application program provided by an application program maker through a network, after a user has obtained the mobile telephone set.